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What’s your lunar sign? If you’ve been on TikTok lately, you’ve probably seen the latest trend taking the app by storm. It’s called “moon phase,” and it may or may not have the power to determine your soul mate. It works by comparing the moon phases of two people on the days they were born — sliding the results together to hopefully form a full moon (meaning you’re meant to be).
While we’re not sure how reliable the trend is for matchmaking, its popularity does reaffirm one thing… Gen Z really loves astrology.
In other news… Billions hang in the balance for studios, Madison Avenue teams up with Hollywood, and TikTokers build new outlets to make money.
Top Trends
YouTube → Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Twitter → Scream VI
Google → Bruce Willis
Reddit → The Last of Us
TikTok → “Every Summertime” - NIKI
Spotify → “If Darkness Had a Son” - Metallica
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ENTERTAINMENT
Rentals in the spotlight // Illustration by Kate Walker
The home video market gets a reboot
The Future. Since movies are mostly migrating right from theaters to streaming (if they even go to theaters), Hollywood may be leaving billions of dollars on the table by skipping out on the home video market. That’s bad news for both studios and creatives. During a time when Hollywood seems to be strapped for cash, finding a way to capitalize on every film release could be a winning formula to maximize profit for companies, put more cash in the hands of filmmakers, and give audiences some consistency.
The return of the rentalThe DVD is on the hunt for its rightful place in the new age of streaming.
The home video market (which includes digital sales and rentals, and physical media) brought in $6.3 billion in revenue last year, according to DEG.
That may be a decline from 2021 (15% drop for rental, 8% for physical and digital sales), but that’s because streaming revenue hit a record $30.3 billion.
But there’s a problem: the streaming economy has proven to not be great for Hollywood, delivering less returns on a bigger content spend for a fixed monthly price. And when that applies to a studio movie going straight from theaters to streaming, the lifecycle of that movie making money is kind of over.
Money waterfallBill Rouhana, CEO of Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment (owner of Redbox), says he’s had constructive conversations with studios about the streaming-economy dilemma and is hoping to normalize a four-to-six-week home video window before movies show up on SVOD.
The argument is that, when in doubt, some people just want to quickly find what they want to watch and pay the price, says a distribution exec to Deadline. No scrolling, no headaches… and no harm to streaming.
All anyone has to do is look at The Woman King as an example. After Sony released it wide in theaters, it became a top-two rental on Redbox and then a top-three on Netflix in the US. That’s a win-win-win.
ENTERTAINMENT
Measuring viewership // Illustration by Kate Walker
Madison Avenue open the black box of viewership data
The Future. Madison Avenue and Hollywood are teaming up to certify the results of new audience-measurement systems. The hope is to finally create a baseline for viewership metrics, especially for streaming. With the venture likely to drag the data into the daylight, Hollywood unions may be taking the gas off of viewership transparency as a key demand in upcoming contract negotiations that could potentially put the whole entertainment industry at a standstill.
Count the eyeballsTop ad buyers, including Dentsu, GroupM, and Horizon Media, are partnering up with the US Joint Industry Committee, a consortium led by Fox, Paramount, NBCUniversal, TelevisaUnivision, Warner Bros. Discovery, and their jointly-owned OpenAP.
Their goal: create a minimum standard of quality that new audience-measuring techs like Samba, ComScore, and iSpot need to meet to be accepted by the industry.
It also puts pressure on Nielsen to step up its game, which has been an ongoing battle for studios.
They’ll be graded on elements such as infrastructure, privacy, interoperability, and governance.
The hope is to roll out a new measurement ecosystem before 2024.
Waiting for the curtain to fallAfter ten years of streaming chaos, the move to create a unified measurement ecosystem reflects just how badly both industries want some semblance of data transparency. Everyone wants to know what is objectively a hit.
So, relying on the limited or cherry-picked viewership numbers that Netflix, Hulu, and all the streamers offer just no longer makes sense when they’re all launching ad-tiers. Accurate results are paramount.
TOGETHER WITH BRILLIANT
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MEDIA
Getting smaller?
TikTokers turn to alternative forms of revenue
The Future. With overall viewership down, payouts from the company's creator fund dwindling, and the specter of an outright ban of the app in the US, TikTokers are updating how they make their videos or finding new outlets for creative expression (and making money). TikTok isn’t likely to lose its luster to creators any time soon, but the platform is maturing, which means it may only get harder to attract the eyeballs many are used to.
Ban-proofingTikTok creators are building new outlets to keep the money train rolling, including…
A switch to YouTube. Thanks to YouTube’s new revenue-sharing model for Shorts, many creators feel like the reach and consistency of YouTube may be a more sustainable fit.
Writing email newsletters. TikTok’s hyper-curated algorithm has been creating silos around creators, hurting growth. So some creators have opted to try an email newsletter to create a centralized hub for their content to be shared.
Optimizing their TikTok. Yep, staying on TikTok, but switching up their videos is a new trend. That includes making TikTok more SEO friendly, especially as the platform becomes Gen Z’s preferred way to search.
It seems the only sure thing about making money on social media is never to put all your eggs in one basket…
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Highlights
The best curated daily stories from around the web
Macro gets major financing
Macro, the content studio founded by former WME agent Charles D. King (behind recent titles like Judas and the Black Messiah and Just Mercy), has raised $90 million in new funding from BlackRock, Harbourview Equity Partners, and Goldman Sachs. It’s the first outside financing since 2017 and will be used to fuel Macro’s expansion in a variety of businesses, including film, TV, advertising, and talent management. With premium production companies the most desirable entities in Hollywood right now, don’t be surprised if Macro attracts some M&A suitors in the near future.
Read more → thr
Wist recreates your memories in mixed reality
A new app called Wist wants to transform your typical iPhone video into an immersive 3D experience that can be seen in AR or VR. When you take a video in the app, the algorithm “collects 3D data from the initial video, including depth, color, and audio information,” according to its creator Andrew R. McHugh. One of McHugh’s Wists has already attracted a lot of strong opinions. The app is currently available on iOS and works with Quest VR headsets.
Read more → vice
Only the fancy survive
...when it comes to office buildings. As businesses try to woo back employees to work in person, the Real Estate Board of New York found that companies with “Class A+” office buildings had a much higher return rate than those with, say, a B. Why does that matter? The areas where people are returning to work will see a major uptick in economic activity — the average worker spends $6,000 a year on things like food and clothes near work. We guess it pays for your job to have a great snack selection.
Read more → axios
De-extinction startups are not really raising the dead
Lately, startups such as Colossal have attracted headlines for wanting to bring back extinct species such as the dodo bird and the woolly mammoth. The problem is, according to Risa Aria Schnebly, a PhD student in biology and society, and Ben A. Minteer, a professor of environmental ethics and conservation (both at Arizona State University) is that they are more like “high-tech lookalikes” and may not have the positive environmental impact that the startups think they’ll have. Sound familiar? Instead, they suggest that it’s important that people grieve for lost species so that they can do a better job of protecting the ones that we still have. But some people will still always want their Jurassic Park…
Read more → fastcompany
The world still runs on floppy disks
Yes, in 2023, several companies are still putting the faith of their internal systems in a technology that your home computer hasn’t been able to use for the past two decades. That includes cargo-airliner Geo Sky, commercial airliners like Boeing and Airbus, and embroidery company Tajima. Not surprisingly, the supply is running low, and the price is going up for those still remaining. One day, the floppy will be finished…
Read more → wire
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Today's email was brought to you by David Vendrell.Edited by Nick Comney. Publishing by Sara Kitnick.